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Reviews
300 (2006)
Tonight... We dine.... at Chuck E Cheese!!
The first few times I saw the trailers for 300, I thought I was watching an advertisement for a Playstation 3 game. Or maybe one for the X-Box 360.. or the Nintendo Pi or whatever that thing is called that gives everyone couch potato elbow. Anyway, it looked like some sort of video game cutscene, and that's basically what this movie is: Two hours of Blizzard's crack team of game designers crafting the heart of every top-selling video game - the cutscene.
As we know, the cutscene's purpose is to fill up the gaps between game missions, where a lot of fighting takes place, with lots of fake looking blood, very little plot advancement, set to a monotonous rock soundtrack in a carefully controlled environment designed to sanitize out those nasty historically correct elements such as, say, swastikas on German aircraft, or dangling genitals from spartan battle dress. You know, things the kiddies aren't really ready to see yet. The cutscene is the place where simplistic dialogue and juvenile storyline happens. Since 300 is a movie and not a video game, it spends a little more time on the cutscenes and a little less on the battle scenes.
Because this story is designed to look like a video game, it plays out as one also. Soldiers all look the same and everything else is exaggerated and made more "extreme". Wolves look like bulimic runway models but still have the tenacity of a shark, war elephants are so big they should have Orlando Bloom hanging from them, and every Spartan looks like he's on a part-time sojourn from his gig at Chippendales. All looking very caucasian, eyes getting bluer and abs getting oilier with bravado. Even the hunchback's hunch is muscular. Oh, and the Persians look like Moors for some reason. I guess Hollywood's Villain-O-Matic has rounded the dial, so to speak, and is back at 'black' again.
The canyon that most of the battle takes place in looks eerie and otherworldly, except for the wheat field that someone forgot to roll up after Gladiator finished shooting, and the spurting blood looks as if someone shot the contents of a lava lamp from a confetti cannon.
Actually, I rather enjoyed the exaggerated look of the whole endeavor, but couldn't they have at least made the characters a little more interesting?? This is based on a comic book for chrissakes! Aren't the characters supposed to be 'bigger-than-life'? While there were apparently three different Spartans (the shouting bearded one, the one missing the eye, and the multi-xeroxed one), the rest of the cast featured a hunchback, some lepers, and Rupaul after a night of heavy drinking and piercing. How do go wrong with that?? It's like the scriptwriters from Underworld found their way onto the set(Could you have imagined insurance seminar speakers led more exciting lives than werewolves and vampires?).
This is an R-rated feature, but it's pretty suitable for 11-15 year old boys. Yes, there's a few female breasts and a decapitation on par with something from an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon to make the young'uns feel like they're watching something for grown-ups, but I'd avoid letting your older ones see this. At least not without having drank enough to not wonder why a Spartan turncoat would bring a purse bursting with Persian payoff money to a city council meeting.
King Kong (2005)
Best Absurdist Comedy Since Van Helsing!
Having purchased a ticket recently to a showing of King Kong (aka Peter Jackson's King Kong Action Movie Based on the Video Game of the Action Movie, King Kong), I went in expecting to see something along the lines of Mr. Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies. A thrilling spectacle of awe and wonder. Instead, by the end of the second hour, I was laughing myself into a near unconscious state. Apparently, Peter Jackson has returned to his comic roots.
You've got giant bats being used as hang gliders, tyrannosaurus rexes swinging from jungle vines, a gun-totin' ship captain who always shows up as soon as the director paints his story into a corner, a giant cricket seeking tommy gun, raptors too dumb to know when they're getting trampled to death, a romantic ice-skating interlude between Kong and his woman, a herd of brontosaurs doing a keystone cops reenactment, and CGI juggling. Yes, CGI juggling! W.C. Fields would be sloshing in his grave over that one.
Perhaps most hilarious, however, is seeing Naomi Watts desperately trying to hook herself up with schnozmeister Adrian Brody. That one just strains the threshold of believability for me.
I think my favorite bit in the movie was when our adventurers come upon an ominous looking cave. A couple hundred bats come flying out as they approach, prompting the lead guy to halt the troop, to which the next guy wonders aloud; "Huh? What is it?" I guess seeing the dozens of bats coming out of the huge dark cave didn't bother him in the least. No wonder later on he was able to cleanly pick off a bunch of giant bugs eating a guy with a wild spray of machine gun fire. This was one cool cat!
There are a couple of flaws in this film, however. The main one is Andy Serkis' CGI-performance as Kong. To bone up for the part, Mr. Serkis made an extensive study of the behavior of gorillas and applied it to his performance. It looks very good by itself, actually. But come on! In a movie where you've got a T-Rex trapeze act and guys body surfing on tumbling brontosaurs, there's no place for that kind of authenticity. It really breaks the comic mood.
That sort of plausibility and attempt at earnestness sandbags the climax as well, when Kong scales the Empire State Building to do battle with 6 Curtiss biplanes. Only 6?? and biplanes?!? Why not 40, or 50 or 120! And make 'em Messerschmitts!! You can do it, PJ! You got the CGI, you got the megabudget, and carte blanch from the studio - surely in a film where Naomi Watts can shrug off the freezing cold in a dinner dress and getting tossed around by Kong like a piece of Samsonite you're not going to let a few mere anachronisms stop you. I was also really hoping Kong would grab one of the planes mid-flight and use it to shoot down the others, screaming "Get away from my girl, you damn dirty Nazis!!". But alas, I had to settle for watching him snatch one of the planes out of the air and boomerang it into another. Eh. Then we get treated to about 10 minutes of teary-faced Ms. Watts as she watches her big ape slip away. I know it meant having to go back to Adrian Brody and all, but I'm sorry - there's no call for blubberin' in a slapstick comedy like this!
I was also a tad disappointed in Kong's fatal plummet to earth, which is shown from a top-down perspective. The director cuts away before the 'money shot' distant cloud of dust as ape strikes terra firma. But I suppose Mr. Jackson felt he had paid enough homage to Road Runner cartoons as it was. Too bad. Seeing Peter Jackson standing in the middle of a rapidly expanding shadow while holding a tiny parasol would have been a fitting final image for this film.
The Bourne Supremacy (2004)
The Bourne Epilepsy
This followup to the excellent 2002 flick starts off with Jason Bourne and girlfriend Marie hanging out in a small beach house in India. Jason is still trying to piece together his past as vague memories of a botched assassination come trickling back into his head while he and Marie apparently live off the fortune they made selling the moped rental shop from the last movie. However, he soon finds out that living in hiding has some drawbacks. Namely, that anyone with access to your fingerprints can use you as an ace-in-the-hole when they want to do something naughty. And that's exactly what happens when a break-in goes awry, thus needing a fall-guy to blame it on. On top of that, a Russian oil baron is after Bourne and sends a hit-man after him in India. So much for the laying low theory.
This picture replicates the gritty feeling of the first movie and has a nice old-school feel to it. It's still a globe-trotting espionage flick - Like Bond, but without all the hoary trappings (the Bond girl, the martinis, the gadget shop) that have helped make that series a complete joke.
Director Paul Greengrass has done some nice things with this installment. One is not over-relying on the action scenes to carry the movie. Indeed, if there had been any more of those, my skull would have exploded. More on that later. He gives the characters some depth, and despite a bit of convolution, lays out a credible story. He's also not afraid to pull punches. There's a moment early on in the film that will come as quite a shock, especially if you are already familiar with the first movie. Definitely not the sort of safe, cookie-cutter film-making Hollywood has engaged in recently. Nor does he fall into the sentimental tar pit that undermines most pictures of this caliber. There's a scene near the end that lands a nice solid emotional punch as it wraps up the remaining loose ends that never once veers into maudlin-ville. Nice job. He also manages to get some actual acting out of Matt Damon. Not an easy thing to do.
As Jason uncovers the mystery surrounding his sudden predicament, he uncovers more about his troubled past, and we begin to learn some more about him. Such as the fact that he prefers to apply mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to unconscious people underwater. That seems like it would be pretty difficult. I must have missed that part in my CPR classes. He also seems to be in no short supply of firearms no matter where he goes. Over the course of the movie, he must hit about 5 continents, and somehow remains able to brandish the hardware at any time. I guess the rest of the world isn't as hung up about that 9/11 thing as we are. He's also a computer whiz and has figured out that movie-world secret of how to make them emit those cool electronic chirping noises whenever he hits the enter key or a digital images appears on screen. Man, I wish I could figure out how that's done. Would definitely add some zing to my review-writing.
Now for the bad part. The dizzying camera-work. If you go see this, do yourself a favor and bring a paint shaker from your local hardware store. Clamp your head into it, turn it on during the action scenes, and if you sync it right, you should be able to follow everything just peachy. If you don't, prepare to leave the theatre with your eyeballs in a serious state of nystagmus. It's so bad, it almost feels like a parody of all the shaky-cam action movies that have come before it. Like something SNL would do if they ever got back to being funny.
Too bad, as some of the action scenes are pretty good, including a car chase inside a tunnel crowded with traffic. Unlike most action films, the surrounding cars respond like real drivers would in that instance - by doing something stupid and pulling their car out into the path of the oncoming speedsters. This results in lots of cars getting decked and bounced off the walls. It's all good, crunchy fun. Unfortunately, you'll only see bits and pieces of it. Call me old-fashioned, but I'm of the mind that complicated action scenes should be long steady pull-back shots where you can see all the hard work that went into making them. Imagine the long uncut tracking shots of Hard Boiled's hospital shootout, or the Tartar raid in Andrei Rublev being cut every half-second and filmed as if the camera were inserted into a trash can and rolled like a stuffed freshman into the middle of the action.
Anyway, The Bourne Supremacy is still a good film, a better one I think in the story, action, and character departments than the original. I have to deck it a few points for the distinct lack of a tripod, but I'll be looking forward to the next one with high hopes they fix that problem.
The Manchurian Candidate (2004)
Corporations R Us
You know, it's been so long since a political thriller has hit the theaters, I'd almost forgotten that they even existed at one time. This one is of course a remake - I mean, how else are you going to get anyone interested in this sort of material nowadays without having some CGI or a hero prancing about in tights and a cape? - but I will try to review it on its own terms.
The story opens with a group of marines doing some recon work in Kuwait in the days before The first Gulf War. They get ambushed, mayhem ensues, and the next thing everyone knows, it's several years later, and the troop's leader, Ben Marco (Denzel Washington) is addressing some boy scouts about the Congressional Medal of Honor which was awarded not to him, but one of his men. That guy's name is Raymond Shaw, and he's a politician these days, and one being groomed for the vice-presidency in the upcoming presidential election. Apparently the only thing on his resume that warrants qualification is the medal he won for fighting off the ambush and saving most of his squad. No mention is made of his purple hearts, though. Shaw's mom (Meryl Streep) is a high ranking senator and she's pushing real hard to get her boy into the White House. At the party's convention, she brow-beats an entire room of Democrat bigwigs into changing their minds from selecting Jon Voight as their veep candidate to choosing her son. After all, Raymond won the Medal of Honor defending US soldiers from an Iraqi ambush, while Voight couldn't even save Ned Beatty from those two hillbillies down by the river.
Marco begins suspecting something isn't right about all this. He has dreams about that night in Kuwait. Maybe Shaw didn't deserve do anything to deserve that Medal. Maybe Shaw didn't do anything at all. Maybe some Cup-O-Noodles would really hit the spot. He then begins to piece together the strong possibility that his entire squad was really only brainwashed into thinking Shaw had saved them and that they were coerced into working together to help him get his Medal, which would in turn, get him into the White House. Because as we know, it's all about the medals and connections when it comes to choosing our next leader. Ideas and administrative accomplishments mean zip. Anyway, all this appears to be orchestrated by an outfit called Manchurian Global, a big time defense contractor that gets no-bid military contracts and seems to enjoy other wartime pursuits.
This is probably the biggest obstacle in the movie. You might say to yourself "Whoa! A mega-corporation engineering what goes on in the White House?! No way!" and then you might wonder why Manchurian Global is going through so much trouble to achieve this end. Good heavens, they stick tracking devices in your shoulder, drill holes into your noggin and stick things there, talk you into practicing your killing techniques on your buddies, and worst of all, they make you eat those damn Cup-O-Noodles. All that sure seems like a lot of effort. Halliburton just used money, political shell-games, and plain old-fashioned voter ignorance when they did it. But godblessit, there's something that just appeals to me about watching a doctor take a Black & Decker to poor old Raymond Shaw's skull while he sits there, blissfully unaware of what's happening and smiling like he just found the Thorazine cookies. It reminds me a bit of the X-Files series, before they tied that show up into a huge knot.
The rest of the film shows Marco trying to uncover the mystery without losing his own mind. He's already reading cheap paperback romance novels, so he'd better hurry.
The acting in this picture is pretty good across the board, but Meryl Streep as the senatorial harpy/mom deserves special mention. You don't get to see her chew scenery often, but she does it here, in what would best be described as a riff on a certain former first lady named Clinton. Streep has gone on record as denying this connection, but come on - who is she kidding? This is clearly the Hilary we all like to believe exists when the cameras aren't rolling.
The film has lots of tertiary information provided by sound bites and TV ticker scrawls. You may miss a few background things if you're not paying attention. There's also plenty of references to the silliness of today's politics. One image shows the presidential and VP candidate's faces tacked up on a doctored picture of Mt. Rushmore. Another scene has them dragging cops and firefighters out onto the stage with them. The targets here aren't so much the left or the right as much as the whole political process. That's another thing I liked about this movie. At least I'm not the only one wondering how the pundits can sit there on TV with straight faces and tell us how a VP candidate's main strength is the number of delegates he'll help carry on election day, like some late-season free agent acquisition in baseball - The guy who'll get you to the playoffs, but you don't want to build the franchise around him.
As far as comparing Demme's Manchurian Candidate to the original, it lacks the eerie out-of-left-field wackiness from Frankenheimer's version. Like the garden party/brainwashing scene, or Janet Leigh calling herself a Chinese railworker. That kind of stuff kept you on your toes and made you wonder if you weren't hallucinating along with the characters. On the other hand, it also doesn't deflate itself with something like that hilariously awful fight scene in the original between Sinatra and Henry Silva. Sinatra's Kung-Fu was so bad, even Elvis laughed at it. Without his meds. There's also no Queen-of-Diamonds costume whopper that made you wonder just what the heck Frankenheimer was trying to pull. In other words, the remake is a little more consistent and a little less daring. Take that for what it's worth.
Personally, I enjoyed the Demme version quite a bit. It stands up well along with the original, as it uses the basic storyline to address things relevant to our current situation and so avoids being the typical pointless Hollywood remake. A few minor plot holes keep it from being a great film, but it's a nice little venture into a sub-genre of movie that hasn't been getting any attention lately.
I, Robot (2004)
I, Fresh Prince
I, Robot finds Will Smith in unfamiliar territory - a movie with a hint of intelligence. Based very loosely on Isaac Asimov's robot stories, using the "3 Laws" as a launching point, the picture is set just 35 years after the Willenium, in 2035 Chicago.
Apparently, I, Robot feels you did not see enough advertising before the start of the movie, as straight away, you'll be inundated with ads for a sneaker company, a parcel delivery service, and by the time you leave the theater, you'll have a strange notion that you really need an Audi. Audi is good... Audi is your friend... Audi will not harm you...
You'll also notice a couple things right off the bat about the future. One is that transportation and robot technology will make incredible leaps and bounds over the next 31 years, to the point where Chicago has a whole underground autobahn for maglev-type vehicles. Wow, who ironed out that bureaucracy? My local government is going to take over a decade to build a 15-mile beltway that's above ground, made out of plain old concrete, and will only accommodate regular gas-powered cars. The underground roadway of I, Robot even comes with its own automated valet, which files your car away vertically in a specially made "parking lot". Pretty cool, and a small price to pay for having to learn to own a car without loose items inside. The other thing you'll notice is that people of the future are awfully trusting of robotic technology. They absolutely refuse to believe that robots can glitch. Then again, Microsoft's logo is nowhere to be found in the picture, so that might make some sense.
This lack of technophobia is explained shortly, when Detective Spooner (Will Smith) meets Dr. Calvin (Bridget Moynahan) during an investigation of a fishy looking suicide involving robot engineering genius Dr. Lanning (James Cromwell) in his office at US Robotics, a company which has gone from making modems in the 20th century to robots in the 21st (What foresight!). Dr. Calvin's job is to make these creepy and potentially dangerous robots appear human and trustworthy, a lot like how a government neuters its constitution by cratering the 1st and 4th amendments and makes it all seem friendly and beneficial by calling it the "Patriot Act". Anyway, Dr. Calvin has a doubter on her hands with Det. Spooner. He hates robots. At first, it seems it's just because he's old fashioned. He owns a gas-powered motorbike, listens to Stevie Wonder tunes from 65 years ago, prefers to drive his maglev using the steering wheel, and still struts around in that gangsta-rapper swagger that went out of fashion way back in the year 2004. He's so old school, he even showers without a curtain. However, you will eventually learn he has another reason for hating robots during a plot contrivance midway through the film, shortly after another plot contrivance that reveals his bionic arm.
Spooner suspects a model in the latest line of robots is behind the good doctor's death, but has no real evidence and is hampered by the unrelenting faith of the robot believers, even after a glitch in the building's security system, named NIKI (Shodan, from System Shock) blots out the critical moment from the surveillance tapes.
This is where Spooner's investigation begins, and after a couple requisite cop-movie clichés (case obsession, booted from force), he uncovers a conspiracy involving a robot revolution, stemming from an over-translation of the 3 Robotic Laws.
Somebody should have told Will Smith this wasn't Men in Black III, as his wisecracking persona that we've seen a hundred times already is really out of place here. And those 'hero leaps'? Where the hero hurtles himself through the air in slow-motion while pulling off some inhuman feat (usually involving firearms)? Yep, sadly, a couple of those are in there as well, making one suspect that John Woo has hijacked the production. We also get to see yet another example of 2004's favorite cinematic chestnut, the CGI army, topped off by a scene where hundreds of robots scale the side of a skyscraper. Aside from that, the CGI is actually very good. There's also a faint attempt in the story to determine what constitutes the line between artificial life and real life, but fortunately, the filmmakers realized this was ground trod plenty enough times by Star Trek alone and let it drop.
On the plus side, I, Robot has plenty of action and unlike many of today's movies, has a keen sense of rhythm about it, and in spite of a few too many shopworn story devices, this movie still has a surprise or two and doesn't take 2 and a half hours to get it out. While it first appears to be an anti-technology film, this isn't so much the case as a warning for checks and balances in safety/prevention devices, no matter how simple and self-maintaining they may appear to be. It's not often a modern Hollywood film - a sci-fi actioner, no less - actually has something to say about our current state of affairs.
Hellboy (2004)
Heckboy
There are guys with faces just made for Hollywood. I speak not of the Tom Cruises, Paul Newmans, and Cary Grants. I'm talking about the Marty Feldmans, Michael Berrymans, Edna May Olivers, and Rondo Hattons. People so goofy looking, they could only get a job in the movies. Actors like this are handy because they require almost no makeup. Their face is its own special effect. So you gotta wonder why the filmmakers of Hellboy would cast Ron Perlman - a pretty damn beastly looking guy on his own - for the title role, then bury him under a ton of makeup and red paint. They could have got just any large actor and it wouldn't have made for any extra trouble. Not putting anything against Ron Perlman, who's a fine enough actor, but he's not exactly the first guy that comes to mind when you think 'starring role'. Come to think of it, they did the same thing with Perlman in that TV show he had way back when.
Anyway, Ron plays the adult Hellboy, a sort of orphaned demon who gets adopted as a toddler by a British paranormal officer during WWII. As already stated, he's all red, plus he has a huge left forearm that looks like one of those things attack-dog trainers wear, and has two humongous horns that protrude from his forehead. He keeps these filed down because he wants to fit in better with humans. Red humans with tails and elephantiasis of the left arm, apparently. Personally, I think he keeps them filed down because they look like cool aviator goggles pulled up above his eyes.
Together, Hellboy and his aging British foster parent (John Hurt) fight crime along with a Fishman that apparently was also adopted along the way. Fishman looks a little like a cross between the aliens in Close Encounters and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. He lives in a giant fish tank, but can survive outside with a special collar. Fishman is more of an intellectual non-violent sort and provides all the case research and background info for Hellboy to gruffly dismiss as he breaks out the hardware. Into the fold comes a regular 20-something human who is recruited as a partner/servant for Hellboy, as well as the future head of the paranormal crimefighting division once John Hurt kicks the bucket, which looks to be any day now. Hellboy and Fishman have codenames in this underground organization: "Red" and "Blue". You can probably guess which one is which. These are needed because you're pushing the envelope of the PG-13 rating if you're saying 'Hell'Boy all the time.
Hellboy is supposedly based on a comicbook, though to be perfectly candid, I've never heard of it. Then again, I haven't heard of half of the comicbooks they make movies from nowadays, including the X-Men. Yes, I live in a cave, and the last time I cracked a comicbook, Shazam was the hot new thing. Is that guy still around? I suppose not, since there isn't a movie about him out there. Hellboy the movie seems to draw from lots of other comicbook movies, though. There's the strained father-son relationship that Hulk apparently didn't cover sufficiently. There's the whole superheroes-are-persecuted-because-they're-different angle that X-Men always tries to sell. Speaking of X-Men, there's also a character here (that I call FireGirl) who causes things to catch fire. In the first half of the film, she can do this at will, but in the second half, she needs to be slapped in the face first. I'm not sure what that's all about. She always appears to be upset, supposedly because she doesn't like being called "FireStarter" by the kids in her school, especially when Drew Barrymore beat her to it.
Hellboy's first assignment is to take care of the Keymaster of Gozer, who has grown some reptilian dreads and a second pair of eyeballs since his Ghostbuster days. This encounter leads to a big fight in a subway station. Director Guillermo Del Toro sure does like those subway stations. The most notable thing about this fight scene is that right smack in the middle of it, a woman asks Hellboy to save her kittens, which have been left in a wooden box on the floor of the subway station. My first thought at this point was, "What would anyone be doing on a subway with a box of kittens?" But, I've never been on a subway, so I can't really judge. However, I have seen people bring stranger things on an airplane - or at least I did before the FAA decided that things like toenail clippers, laser pointers, and bookmarks were deemed as the tools of hijackers. I bring this scene up, because I think this movie is kind of poking fun at comicbook movies in general, where, as this scene references, someone always has a baby they left in a burning building that needs rescuing. There are other examples in the movie of this tongue-in-cheek approach. The vehicle our crimefighting heroes arrive in is a garbage truck, Hellboy's favorite meal is a monster stack of pancakes, and in one scene he confesses his crush for FireGirl from afar on a rooftop to a 10 year old boy as they share milk and cookies. It's just that kind of film.
Eventually, Hellboy will fight more keymasters, some Nazis, a zombie/robot that wields swords like they were nightsticks, and some giant space squids. To be honest, I got a little lost by that point.
Hellboy is an OK movie if you're into this sort of thing, I guess. I'm not, however, and found the film to be about a half-hour too long. The attempts at humor could've been a nice foil for the typical comicbook-movie shenanigans, but they were never really all that funny, though I'll give it marks for trying.
Juggernaut (1974)
The British should have made more disaster flicks
This is a nice little rarity from the 70's - a disaster film that's actually good. It's about a bomber who plants several drums of high powered explosives on a British ocean liner and threatens to use it to sink the ship if payment of a half million pounds is not made. Cue Dr. Evil.
What's interesting about this movie, is that instead of boring us with the usual soap-opera antics (the edge-of-divorce couple, the terminally-ill child, etc.) the cruise itself turns into a disaster for everyone before the bombs are ever revealed. The ship immediately sails into a storm to which the captain learns that the new gyros they upgraded to are not working, causing the ship to pitch heavily, getting most everybody on board seasick. The weather outside is bad, so all the guests are moping around, shutting themselves up in their cabins or braving the lounge and the overenthusiastic entertainment director, played by Roy Kinnear, who always seemed to find himself in these kind of roles. Those who venture out onto the rolling decks can't prevent their shuffleboard games from drifting into the tennis court, both of which are placed in an area about the size of a three-car garage. In short, these people could use a good bomb crisis to liven things up.
Richard Harris plays the bomb-squad expert who is called upon along with his team to disarm the explosives. Perhaps 'expert' is not the right choice of words, as his crew end up setting off a couple of the bombs in trying to deactivate them. That, and the fact that Harris drinks on the job and at one point recommends throwing in the towel. And that is what makes this movie work - there are no typical heroics you would find in all the other standard-issue disaster flicks of the era. Even the paratroop-like arrival of Harris' team is sufficiently deflated when one of them clumsily loses his dive mask as he jumps from the plane. The ship's captain (Omar Sharif) is carrying on an adulterous affair, some of the bomb squad members get seasick on the ship, and the entertainment director eventually just gives up trying to raise the morale. Nobody is allowed any glory. One of my favorite moments is when a young boy, after being given a book about ships to pass the time with, correctly identifies an innocuous subtly-marked raised flag noting the presence of explosives on the liner, then nonchalantly exclaims "That's 15 points for me."
The movie does eventually button down and give a good, honest and tense bomb-defusing sequence at the end. There's the usual 'which wire to cut' business, but by the time the movie gets there, it has well established that it's not going to be quite that predictable about it. A good British cast is included as well. In addition to Harris and Sharif (who isn't British), Ian Holm and Anthony Hopkins are present, playing landlubber executives trying to help catch and prevent the bomber from fulfilling his threat. I couldn't find Michael Caine, however. He might have been off making a Jaws movie or something. At any rate, this is an excellent thriller that also provides some choice sardonic humor along the way.